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posted by Steve Sebelius
Monday, Apr. 30, 2007 at 7:05 PM
No, we didn’t forget to take a gander at the papers while we were away in paradise (aka the great city of Los Angeles). Here’s a few Quick Hits that arose therefrom:
» A lot of people make a big deal about approval ratings. They cite President George W. Bush’s low-30s approval ratings (or even better, Vice President Dick Cheney, who hovers at 9 percent!) to prove they’re right about a particular issue.
Gov. Jim Gibbons, who was pegged at 29 percent recently, falls into this trap in this week’s Political Notebook in the Review-Journal. He says that other governors had low approval ratings, too, and that it’s no big deal.
Our point is this: If Gibbons is a crappy governor (just stretch your mind and accept that premise for a second) it wouldn’t matter if he had 100 percent approval; he’d still be a crappy governor. Conversely, if he was a great governor, he could have Cheney-class rankings and still be a great governor, no? The public is notoriously fickle about these things, and "approval" is a useless measure in almost all political calculations.
U.S. Sen. Harry Reid should learn this lesson, too. After Reid said recently "this war is lost," Cheney jumped on him with both cloven hooves for being a defeatist. In his reply, Reid mentioned Cheney’s 9 percent approval rating, as if to suggest Cheney was wrong and Reid was right. But that’s plainly ridiculous. Only on Wikipedia do we decide truth by collective accord.
What Reid should have said was this: Dick Cheney has been wrong about nearly every aspect of this war, from making up false connections between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaida to the idea that we’d be greeted as liberators to the existence of WMDs to the notion that the insurgency is in its "final throes." He’s a joke! Listening to him would be like taking sartorial advice from a homeless guy who lives under a bridge and wears a box! Next question!
The only place approval ratings come into play is in the spending of political capital. When you’re not well-thought-of, you don’t have much to spend. And that puts both Bush and our good governor into the political poorhouse.
Not to mention that none of the governors mentioned in the Political Notebook are, say, under investigation by the FBI for allegedly using their former congressional offices to help defense contractors get fat contracts in exchange for free travel. That one is owned exclusively by Gibbons.
Oh, and not for nothing, but could perhaps Gibbons has a low approval rating because he fibs so much? For example, in Friday’s Review-Journal, he said this: "I’m disinclined to support new fees, but I have said I will review any request for fee increases on a case-by-case basis."
Technically, that’s what we call bullshit. Here’s a couple passages from the Feb. 14 R-J: "I always said the public runs this state. They elected me because I oppose tax and fee increases. If the public wants to implement a tax on themselves, that is up to the voting public. A vote of the public will supersede a governor’s reluctance to raise taxes," Gibbons said.
But wait, there’s more: "Brent Boynton, Gibbons’ director of communications, said later the governor was not encouraging legislators to simply hand the issue to voters without examining other options for funding highway construction.
"During the interview, Gibbons reiterated his no-new taxes pledge and added he considers increasing fees the same as increasing taxes.
"As a result, he is reviewing his earlier decision to allow the state Health Division to implement four fee increases.
"’We will probably pull them out,’ he said."
Now, does that sound like Gibbons will "…review any request for fee increases on a case-by-case basis"? Or does it sound more like he’ll review the truth on a case-by-case basis, and toss out any inconvenient ones?
» We knew university chancellor Jim Rogers was inviting trouble when he called recently for a personal income tax in Nevada. Them’s fighting words in this libertarian state!
Sure enough, the Review-Journal editorial page weighed in, slamming the chancellor for saying (we admit, wrongly) that Nevadans don’t pay any taxes now. (We’re pretty sure he meant to say we pay fewer taxes than some of our fellow Americans in other states.) The editorial goes on to say cut wasteful government spending to find the money to put into higher education.
And to think that Editor Tom Mitchell was writing just across the page lamenting that nobody teaches Aesop’s Fables anymore! The idea that the needs of the nation’s second-fastest growing state can be met by simply cutting waste is sure as hell a fairy tale!
Rogers isn’t the first to be slammed for the income-tax idea. Back in 2002, while serving on the task force that examined state tax policy, Las Vegas Sun Editor Brian Greenspun floated the idea, too. He got slammed as if he’d suggested the Earth was flat and the center of the universe, by people who believe that the Earth is flat and the center of the universe.
While a state income tax has little realistic chance of passing, it would accomplish one significant thing: It would provide a further nexus between the people and their government, and reinforce our favorite notion of late: You can’t get things like roads and schools for free.
But we think that if we’re going to talk about a personal income tax, we should also talk about a corporate income tax, which would include businesses like Rogers’ TV stations and Mitchell’s newspaper (which, by the way, is owned by the same company that owns CityLife, and this very blog). Corporations want to be treated as people under the law, don’t they? Well, how about a nice personal income tax for businesses that really do pay nothing on their gross receipts?
It’s only fair.
» We told you state Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio was smart. For whatever it’s worth, he’s come out for Rudy Giuliani for president. (He was joined by U.S. Rep. Jon Porter, who was also pretty prescient in backing U.S. Rep. John Boehner for House Majority — now Minority — Leader when the disgraced Tom DeLay was forced to step down.)
That sly Raggio knows Giuliani is the Republicans only real hope, what with U.S. Sen. John McCain married to the worst foreign policy mistake in American history, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney having held all possible positions on the central moral questions of our time. Giuliani is the most formidable candidate the Republicans have!
This totally interferes with our plans to subtly engineer a Romney-Sam Brownback ticket for the GOP, which is religiously nutty enough to win a primary, but way, way to nutty to take the general. Damn Raggio’s keen intellect!
» And finally today, the nice people over at KNPR-FM 89.5 this morning took a break from what seems to be an every-other-month fundraising drive to invite us to talk about our recent piece on taxes. We faced off with our old friend Chuck Muth, that wily conservative activist who lives now in Carson City. You can hear the discussion here, if you’re so inclined, but if you do, you should really become a public radio member.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Monday, Apr. 30, 2007 at 5:54 PM
LOS ANGELES — We’re still digging out from the pile of work that piled up in big piles on our desk while we were away in Carson City and then again this weekend, at the fabulous Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. We spent most the weekend trudging around the UCLA campus like a sherpa, loaded down with books and magazines. But it was a good loaded down with books and magazines, and we’re sure we’ve lost at least 100 pounds in the effort, which puts us within 100 pounds of our fighting weight.
Some highlights, then, from this weekend’s festivities:
» Religion is taking it on the chin! From former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges‘ expose on American Fascists to Richard Dawkins‘ delving into The God Delusion to Sam Harris declaring The End of Faith to Christopher Hitchens deciding that God Is Not Great, it seems Providence has a PR problem.
"The engine of this despotic movement is despair," Hedges said of Christian fundamentalism during a panel on politics and faith, two of our favorite subjects. Poverty and continuing economic inequality are breeding grounds for the misguided and unscrupulous people of the cloth, Hedges said, and if we don’t confront those underlying forces, "then I think our democracy is doomed."
"In many cases, the best cure for religious radicalism [of all kinds] is integration, is assimilation, is participation" in the larger culture, Hedges added.
But that doesn’t always work, he added. Social and economic development might stop terrorism in Palestine or Lebanon, but not in other places, where "jihadists" want nothing and have no goals other than terrorism for its own sake. "They have to be rooted out. They have to be destroyed. Simple," he said. "If you want something, you can be talked to."
Hedges signed a copy of his book for us later at The Nation’s booth, where we picked up another year’s worth of good lefty lapel buttons. Fight the man!
» Hitchens, of course, proved to be the highlight of the two-day festival. He expounded on the subtitle of his new book — "how religion poisons everything" — and deftly made the other people assigned to his panel look overmatched. We actually felt sorry for poor Jonathan Kirsch, whose latest book is about the book of Revelation, and Zachary Karabell.
Religion, Hitchens argued, asks that believers surrender their most valuable gift, reason, in order to be faithful. And Hitchens wonders why in America people ask to be given credit simply because they have faith, regardless of what kind of faith they have. (A question: Must we give equal deference to faiths that directly contradict each other in terms of doctrine, such as, say, Mormonism and Roman Catholicism? Hitchens’ answer: Yes. We should give both faiths no deference whatever!)
While his fellow panelists argued that religion is a vital social force and that the Bible can and does provide inspiration and illumination, Hitchens replied that faith requires the belief that things will end in some apocalyptic way soon. That negates the initiative for progress, he said.
And what’s up with ascribing any kind of morality to Abraham, who is fully prepared to sacrifice his son Issac on God’s orders? While believers cite that as a sign of deep faith, to Hitchens, it’s simply a disturbed patriarch on the verge of infanticide.
"Surrender of reason is always and everywhere a bad thing," said Hitchens, ironically echoing the cadence of the liturgical Mass.
» Ralph Nader has written (another) book. This time, it’s on family values?!
Nader’s tome — The 17 Traditions – won’t ever be confused for a book by Bill Bennett, however. His liberal traditions include appreciating nature, being a helpful part of your community and getting involved. Nader recalls his father once asking him upon his return from school, "Did you learn how to believe, or did you learn how to think?" (A damn good question for every parent to ask their kids, if you ask us.)
Nader, who said it’s "too early" to decide whether he’ll mount a third bid for the presidency in 2008, said none of the current crop of Democratic candidates has arisen out of a mass movement, and thus none have a mandate from the people. "We’ve been reduced to spectators, onlookers, observers," Nader said. "We need to be the initiators, and it’s not that hard to do."
Mainstream candidates like U.S. Sen. John Kerry in 2004 are being pulled relentlessly by corporate interests, Nader said, so liberals have to stand up to pull him in the opposite direction. "If you look at it as a tug-of-war, if you don’t tug, you’re going to lose," he said.
And the other side is pretty powerful. Nader lamented the good work done by journalists at the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune even as their company was purchased by real estate mogul Sam Zell. The lives and work of those journalists are "so much flotsam and jetsam" to their corporate owners, Nader said.
"How can we have our self-respect and allow that kind of corporate tyranny?" he asked the applauding crowd. (We think any Times staffers in the audience were probably clapping the loudest of all.)
» Did you know that the Sept. 11 attacks were a conspiracy? If not, plenty of people who showed up at the festival were willing to tell you all about it. They clogged seminars and jumped to their feet to ask "questions" that were really speeches about the government’s "controlled demolition" of the Twin Towers.
We did walk by the booth of the "9/11 truth now" people, but in the quick, no-eye-contact way that most of us avoid mentally ill homeless people or Dr. Phil (who was also at the festival). We considered hearing them out, but realized it was fruitless: If you ignore the conspiracy theory, you’re either stupid or bought off. If you investigate it and conclude they’re wrong, you’re still stupid or bought off. There’s just no way to win. But the fact that there are people out there who fervently believe the American government was behind Sept. 11 is somewhat scary.
Ultimately, it was Hitchens who devised a way to deal with them. "Go away," he boomed at a ringleader itching to ask a "question" in the form of a speech. "We don’t want fascist crackpots taking up our meeting."
» Robert Scheer may have been canned by the Los Angeles Times, but he’s still got the same muckracking spirit that he first developed covering Vietnam. (You can read him now in the San Francisco Chronicle and on TruthDig.com.)
It’s little wonder that Iraqis don’t really care for American-style democracy, Scheer said, given that the version we’ve shown them includes condoning torture, lying about our reasons for starting a war and subverting our own Constitution.
When Vietnam was raging, conservatives warned that a loss there would embolden communists, who would go on a country-by-country conquering tour that would eventually end up lapping at America’s shores. But that never happened. Yet today, the rhetoric over Iraq is eerily similar.
"It’s like you break into a house, you rape the people, you steal their treasure, but you say, ‘We can’t just leave now,’" Scheer said, to applause.
And master of the timeline that he is, Scheer reminded the audience that the crimes against humanity for which Saddam Hussein was hung took place in 1982, and they were known before a smiling Reagan administration official named Donald Rumsfeld showed up in Baghdad to shake Hussein’s hand and offer him military hardware that he’d later use against his own people, the only documented weapons of mass destruction used in Iraq.
Scheer also got a few laughs when he wished for another Hitchens appearance, so to challenge Hitchens’ support for the Iraq war and friendship with discredited Iraqi figure Ahmad Chalibi. We found ourselves wishing to see Hitchens and Scheer square off, too.
We also liked the comments of Scheer’s fellow panelist William Langewiesche, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine. He said the assumption in Iraq has always been that if Iraqis would only be reasonable, they would see the merits of a democratic system. But Iraqis are well-educated, and well-read, and have a far more realistic understand of their nation’s problems than Americans.
America, as a country, bears the blame for the war now, Langewiesche said. "America made serious errors. Our leaders did, and the American people did when they re-elected those leaders," he said. Don’t blame us; we voted for Kerry.
» Quotable: "Are you there, God? It’s me, Hitchens." — headline of New York magazine’s Q&A with Hitchens.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Wednesday, Apr. 25, 2007 at 11:58 AM
CARSON CITY — We at Various Things & Stuff are about to end our Big Capital Adventure, but there are a few last minute things to blog about before we head for the airport. Here we go!
• It’s back! That proposal to keep the Wynn Las Vegas from stealing tips earned by its dealers — which died in the Assembly Judiciary Committee on April 13 — returned from the dead, amended into another bill at the 11th hour Tuesday. “We finally got some backbone,” said a pleased lawmaker this morning.
The bill had originally been introduced by Assemblyman Bob Beers, who, like us, thinks courts and state officials have been ignoring state law that makes management-imposed “tip pooling” illegal. Beers, too, was pleased that his concept survived, if not his bill. He said in an e-mail that the grass-roots campaign by Wynn dealers had turned the tide.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Bernie Anderson, too, was pleased.
“We wanted to send a clear message that people who receive gratuities are not to be interfered with by management,” he said.
That was quite a change for Anderson, who wouldn’t allow witnesses testifying on Beers’ original bill to even utter the name “Wynn,” although that’s the only casino in Nevada to force dealers to share tips with their supervisors. (Wynn executives said they created the “tip pooling” program to induce dealers to take supervisory jobs, where salaries are less than what dealers make when you add tips to their base salaries.)
But doing the right thing, even at the 11th hour, is never a bad thing. The bill will now head to the state Senate, which pro-business Republicans will likely go all Freddy Krueger on it.
Speaking of pro-business Republicans, 10 voted against the anti-tip stealing bill. They were: Francis Allen, Chad Christensen, Ty Cobb, Heidi Gansert, Tom Grady, Joe Hardy, Garn Mabey, John Marvel, James Settelmeyer and Valerie Weber.
Assembly Minority Leader Mabey said Republicans didn’t have enough time to check with their masters in the gambling industry to decide how to vote on the bill. (No, seriously, he did. Check this line from the Review-Journal’s story on the bill today: “Assembly Minority Leader Garn Mabey, R-Las Vegas, said they [Republicans] did not receive the amendment until 30 minutes before the vote. That was not enough time to consult people in the gaming [sic] industry, he said.”)
Republicans, Mabey added, don’t “want to dictate to businesses how they run their business.” Unless, of course, those businesses want to hire illegal immigrants. Then they put the “dick” in “dictate.” Or, say a K Street lobbying firm doesn’t have enough Republicans. Republicans will definitely get involved then. But, sure, if you want to pollute the air, pay people less than minimum wage, bust unions or skimp on health care, pro-business Republicans have totally got your back.
• But not all Republicans are bad. Take Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, for example. Raggio dropped by the press box on the Senate floor on Tuesday during a lull in the action, where we were chatting with our legislative look-alike, state Sen. Bob Beers. It’s the considered opinion of Nevada’s longest-serving and most distinguished state senator that we are better looking than Beers. That’s not us saying it, people. It’s Raggio. And his opinion counts!
• He’s back! Our favorite ex-state senator, Joe Neal, returned to Carson City last night so he could testify at a legislative hearing this morning. And Neal was still as sharp as he was during his decades crossing swords with the upper house’s brightest minds.
Today, Neal was urging the Legislature to spend $150,000 to audit electronic voting machines used in Nevada, which he said could be hacked. The audit is contained in SB 423.
“This area is very critical to ensuring the confidence of the voting public in this state,” Neal told the Senate Finance Committee. “We do need this to not lose confidence in the voting process.”
State law allows for an audit of voting machines, but doesn’t specify who is responsible to conduct it. However, Neal said the secretary of state’s office should not audit itself because of the obvious conflict.
State Sen. Barbara Cegavske said she had concerns about electronic voting, too, but they were rested when she toured a facility run by the vote counting company. “I do have a better trust than I did in the beginning,” she said.
Neal replied that he’s had conversations with Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax, but “these things in terms of [vote] changes do not happen when senators are standing around watching how the machines operate,” Neal said. Like we said, he’s still got it.
• Let us also offer a word of praise for the work of the Legislative Counsel Bureau, especially with respect to the Legislature’s website. It’s one of the best, most comprehensive and easiest sites we’ve ever used from a government agency, and it helped us immeasurably during our Carson sojourn. No matter what information you’re looking for, from bills to votes to a list of lawmakers and where to find them, this website is great. They’ve even got a list of bills that died after Tuesday’s deadline up on the web, right now. Excellent work, legislative web people!
• We’re back! Or at least, we’re heading that way. We’re going to take a couple days off from blogging, as we return to Las Vegas, tape a TV show and then head out across the great Mohave expanse to attend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. We’ll be back, and totally literary, next week.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2007 at 6:27 PM
CARSON CITY — The third time is (totally not) the charm. That’s what state Sen. Dennis Nolan must be thinking today, after his latest effort to legalize red-light cameras fell flat. (Actually, it fell even more than flat, earning only six votes in the 21-member upper house.
Nolan said it was his third time trying to introduce the neo-fascist red-light cameras, which snap a picture of a driver blowing through the red light and send the registered owner of the car a citation through the mail.
What if you’re not the registered owner? Well, you can send a formal protest with a copy of your drivers license, which officials will compare with the photo taken by the red-light camera to determine your guilt. Yes, seriously.
“Aggressive traffic violators have become such a problem,” Nolan said. And there aren’t enough cops to sit at each problem intersection to hand out tickets in person, he said. (That’s probably good; if you get a ticket from a real, live cop, you pay a hefty fine for a moving violation. If you get a red-light camera ticket, it’s more like a parking ticket fine.)
But Nolan was undone by colleagues like state Sen. Mike Schneider, who recounted a harrowing tale in which his wife rushed him to the hospital to treat an allergic reaction. Although she stopped at each red light, she also ran through them, a lifesaving trip that nonetheless would have earned the Schneider family a handful of tickets.
And state Sen. Barbara Cegavske asked a rhetorical question: Would the cameras be removed once the “pilot program” was concluded? (Answer: No way.) Ironically, Cegavske is the author of a separate bill that aims to ban “video voyeurism.” She was consistent, joining 15 senators to vote down Nolan’s proposal.
He only got support, in fact, from Sens. Bob Coffin, Joe Heck, John Lee, Randolph Townsend and Joyce Woodhouse.
All was not lost in the neo-fascist community, however. Nolan did get support for his bill to make not wearing a seat belt a “primary offense.” Currently, you can be cited for not wearing a seat belt, but only if you were pulled over for something else (like speeding or failing to use a lane-change signal). That bill, which passed the Senate 11-10, and is now headed to the Assembly.
Now, wouldn’t you think that a person who didn’t believe in red-light cameras would similarly not believe in a nanny-state law like wearing your seatbelt? Us, too. We compared the vote to learn that the following senators voted for the seatbelt law, but against the red-light cameras: Sens. Mark Amodei, Warren Hardy, Bill Raggio, Dean Rhoads, Mike Schneider and Maurice Washington. And Coffin voted for the red-light cameras but against seatbelts.
• Dina (Hates) Taxes!
State Sen. Dina Titus voted to kill more taxes Tuesday, joining on the winning side of the 9-12 split to deny Douglas County the right to increase the room tax. Titus joined the majority on Monday in killing a proposal to raise sales taxes in Nye County for more cops. She also voted against a proposal to let Lyon and Douglas counties raise property taxes to build a new juvenile detention center.
And at day’s end, Titus also voted against a bill that would have let voters decide on raising sales and real estate taxes — not to mention imposing impact fees — for schools in Washoe County.
Gov. Jim Gibbons claimed on the campaign trail that Titus would cost money while he’d save it, but it looks like Titus is the one just saying no to taxes.
We’re totally sure its just a coincidence that voters in Lyon, Douglas, Nye and Washoe counties voted with solid majorities for Gibbons.
• The following, totally bizarre, series of events actually happened on the Senate floor on Tuesday:
First, the Senate approved SB 52, a bill that gives student a full ride Millennium Scholarship if they major in special education, math and science. (Currently the scholarship provides most, but not all, the money needed to attend a state university or community college.) The bill also would allow illegal immigrants to get the scholarship, provided they sign an affidavit saying they fully intend to become U.S. citizens. If they don’t, they have to repay the scholarship.
Second, much later in the day, Democrats tried to amend SB 415 — another bill pertaining to the scholarship, but with some different provisions — with the same immigrant-affidavit language. (Although the affidavit provision would become law if SB 52 passed, there would be a conflict if SB 415 also passed without the language.)
But Republicans signaled on Monday they’d object to the amendment, so Titus devised a way to convince her GOP colleagues to come along: She included language that would allow regents to waive the two-year residency requirement to get the Millennium Scholarship for children of military parents, who may be deployed to Nevada for less than the four years kids go to high school.
Alas, the GOP wasn’t falling for that one; SB 415 author Heck introduced an amendment of his own, which kept the military-family language but dropped the immigrant-affidavit language. When the amendments came up, Titus’ was voted down on party lines, while Heck’s was approved unanimously.
Titus immediately rose and moved that, since the language in Heck’s amendment was identical to the Democrats, the names of all Democratic senators should be added as co-sponsors. Raggio shot back that there’s been a lot of “byplay” over the immigration issue in the past two days, and that Titus motion was out of order.
She didn’t back down, however, asking for the record to show that the Democratic senators were denied in their request to have their names on the Heck Amendment, which prompted Raggio to rethink his comments. Saying he had been “hasty” — and encouraging senators to be collegial — he offered to let the Democrats have their names on the amendment. Second later, he was told that only Heck’s name was on the amendment, so he offered the Republicans a chance to get their name on, too. They all agreed.
And everybody was happy. More or less. But now the two bills — SB 52 and SB 415, which was approved 17-4 on a later agenda — go to the Assembly, where the differences must be addressed. Could this debate happen again, in a future conference committee? Probably, since Titus pledged she’s try to amend the bill in the Assembly. We haven’t seen the last of either bill.
• Hardy insists that his bill to recognize a fetus as a person who can become the victim of a crime was not an attempt to erode abortion rights in Nevada. But abortion opponents didn’t quite see it that way, and the bill was widely seen as a ham-handed end run around the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, not to mention voter-ratified Nevada state law legalizing abortion.
The hot potato bill was whispered about for much of the first half of the session, but Titus and others worked on an amendment to fix their problems with the bill. (Hardy says the bill was sparked by a constituent whose pregnant wife was hit by a drunk driver and lost her baby. Under existing law, he could only be charged with battery, according to Amodei.)
Under the revised version of the bill, violent crimes against pregnant women can result in the doubling of the sentence against the perpetrator, and a DUI that results in a pregnant woman losing her baby is a category B felony, punishable by a jail sentence of between two and 20 years.
But there’s no provision for a fetus to be considered a person in the amended version of the law, which maintains the national and state status quo on abortion rights. At the end of the day, Hardy thanked his colleagues “who took me at my word when I said I was not trying to touch on the very sensitive debate over abortion in this country.”
• You mean 19 senators voted to make English the official language of the state? Oh, yes, it’s that bad. We rant on that in our column in this week’s CityLife. (It will be up on the web Thursday.)
• The Senate is supposed to be the more deliberative body. But that was little comfort to senators as they labored late into the day on Tuesday to meet constitutional deadlines. The Assembly finished its work by midday, and leaders were presumably knee deep in margaritas by 5 p.m., when the Senate was preparing to debate its third agenda of the day.
And speaking of being knee deep in margaritas, that’s all for today, readers!
posted by Steve Sebelius
Monday, Apr. 23, 2007 at 4:28 PM
CARSON CITY — Well, it looks like our secret evil plan to buy ourselves a boatload of politicians via secret contributions ladled out by VT&S LLCs is dead. Thanks a lot, Assembly. The Assembly approved, by a vote of 32 to 10, a bill that would force companies whose ownership is hidden by Nevada’s notoriously friendly business laws to disclose their owners once they decided to get involved in politics.Currently, it’s technically possible for a person — let’s call him Evil Political Kingmaker — to form 100 limited liability corporations, the public filings for which don’t identify him. Then, Evil Political Kingmaker can donate $10,000 through each LLC, thus donating $1 million to a candidate. And it would all be legal, since each LLC is a separate business entity.But now, under AB 80, Evil Political Kingmaker would have to identify himself, thus thwarting his secret evil plan.
It’s a good bill, but oddly, several members of the Assembly voted against it. And even more oddly, all of them were Republicans. Why it’s almost like Republicans want to allow businesses to buy and sell politicians under a warm, cozy blanket of secrecy!
For the record, here are the Assembly members who voted to allow LLCs to continue operating in secrecy: Bob Beers, John Carpenter, Chad Christensen, Ty Cobb, Pete Goicoechea, Tom Grady, Joe Hardy, Garn Mabey, John Marvel and Lynn Stewart.
• Meanwhile, in the state Senate, things were getting retarded, too.
Oh, wait. Sorry. It seems we just violated a would-be state law. See, state Sen. Barbara Cegavske was chairwoman of an interim committee in which members of the “disabled community” expressed their preference that they be called “people” first, and not be known by their disability. Thus, a “person with disabilities” is the preferred term to, say, a “disabled person.” ("Retarded" is totally out of vogue.)
State Sen. Bob Coffin voted against Cegavske’s SB 491, which would require the state’s lawbooks be re-written with the less offensive language. That’s going to take a lot of time, and everybody uses “disabled person” in the common vernacular, don’t they?
Alas, Coffin’s fellow senators disagreed, and approved the bill 20-1. It’s now headed to the Assembly.
• Anyway, as we were saying, things in the state Senate were getting totally disabled. Or something.
SB 415 is a bill that would define “bona fide resident” of Nevada specifically to exclude illegal immigrants. And as a result of that, no illegal immigrant would be allowed to get in-state tuition at any state university.
State Sen. Steven Horsford tried to amend SB 415 with language that said if an illegal immigrant signed an affidavit indicating he or she would apply to become a citizen, then that person could be eligible for the Millennium Scholarship. If a citizenship application wasn’t filed or the student didn’t go through with the application, he or she could be forced to repay the scholarship, under Horsford’s amendment.
But that failed on a voice vote in the Senate.
Then, a short while later, the Senate took up AB 52, which makes several changes to the Millennium Scholarship. And guess what language was proposed for an amendment to that bill? You guessed it — the precise language that Horsford wanted to include in SB 415.
State Sen. Dina Titus was understandably confused, and had some pointed questions for Senate Human Resources and Education Committee Chairman Maurice Washington: What’s the difference whether the Senate allowed illegal immigrant students to apply for the scholarship in SB 415 versus SB 52? And how can illegal immigrants not qualify for in-state tuition when, by definition, only in-state students can get the Millennium Scholarships?
It’s a bundle of contradictions, indeed.
Oh, by the way, the Senate approved the amendment on a voice vote. The bill will appear on the Senate’s agenda tomorrow.
• Don’t say Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio is a hypocrite.
Last week, he voted against a bill that would mandate insurance companies and self-funded insurance plans cover inoculations for the human papollima virus, which causes cervical cancer in women. (Republicans hate mandates, after all.)
Well, we were all set to jump on Raggio’s case, as he was a co-sponsor (along with three other Republicans) of SB 113, which forces health insurance companies to cover prostate cancer screenings, another mandate.
Sexist? Yes. Inconsistent? You bet? Fun times? Can’t wait.
But Raggio outmaneuvered us once again, by voting against the bill he co-sponsored. In fact, the bill barely passed 11-10. (Other no votes were Mark Amodei, Bob Beers, Cegavske, Warren Hardy, Joe Heck, Mike McGinness, Dennis Nolan (who also co-sponsored the measure), Dean Rhodes Rhoads and Washington.
• Taxes, taxes, everywhere. The state Senate surely has stopped worrying about whether Gov. Jim Gibbons is going to sign tax-related bills, even ones that leave tax increases up to the voters or local governments in certain counties.
Senators approved SB 141, which allows Washoe County voters to decide whether to raise the sales and real estate transfer taxes, as well as charge impact fees, to pay for schools. That bill will come back for final approval later.
The Senate also narrowly approved SB 146, which allows Lyon and Churchill counties to raise the property tax to pay for a juvenile detention center. (The vote on that was 11-10, with Democrats Maggie Carlton, Titus and Horsford joining Republicans like Beers and Cegavske to say no.)
A third tax measure, which would have allowed Nye County to boost the sales tax for public safety, failed 9-12, again with Titus, Carlton, and Horsford voting no, against Republicans like Randolph Townsend, Raggio and Amodei voting yes.)
A further irony? Anti-tax Gibbons won Washoe, Lyon, Churchill and Nye counties, all with plenty of room to spare. With the election a fading memory, it seems some people in those counties are starting to realize the value of taxes.
Too bad they can’t persuade Titus to agree, eh?
• There’s more action ahead, too. The Assembly is meeting as we post this, and the Senate has yet another session scheduled for later today. The deadline for all bills to pass the house where they were first introduced is midnight on Tuesday, so there should be some shenanigans yet to come.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Monday, Apr. 23, 2007 at 8:32 AM
CARSON CITY — People in Southern Nevada may not be as familiar with the 14-year-old news program Nevada Newsmakers, which originates from up north. But program host Sam Shad regularly empanels newsmakers and journalists to discuss the issues of the day, the way Nevada Week in Review does down south. (In fact, we have been a regular guest on Nevada Week in Review, and a one-time guest on Nevada Newsmakers, way back in the day. Both programs are on the air in Southern Nevada.)
Anyway, we were surprised last week to get an e-mail from Shad, announcing the "Nevada Newsmakers Outreach" hosting of the "1st Annual Outreach Awards Dinner," slated for May 9 at the Gold Dust West here in the capital.
(Picky side note: We print journalists never use the phrase "1st annual," since if something is in its first year, it cannot by definition be annual. It’s just the first.)
But violations of AP style are just the tip of the journalistic iceberg on this one. Because it turns out, the honorees for this dinner are Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley and Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio who will be recognized "…for their public service."
Don’t get us wrong; we think the world of both Buckley and Raggio, and both deserve to be lauded for their accomplishments (Raggio is the longest-serving state senator in Nevada history, and Buckley is the first female speaker ever. Both are stellar lawmakers.)
But a news program honoring politicians? It’s just generally not done. Journalists are supposed to interview lawmakers, sometimes asking them hard questions and holding them accountable for their actions. They’re not supposed to toss them bouquets at parties, because it makes the watchdog part harder.
But wait. There’s more. It turns out that the dinner is a fundraiser ($2,500 for a table of 10!). And where will the money go, pray tell?
To "Nevada Newsmakers Outreach," which is a 501(c)(3) charity "…working to bring the Nevada Newsmakers TV talk show to audiences outside its regular viewership, to increase their knowledge and understanding of the most pressing issues in Nevada politics, business, health and education."
In other words, to the show. Which means that state lawmakers — who may be interviewed by Shad in the future — are helping him raise money to expand his show. There is no clearer example of a conflict of interest. (Oh, and just in case you think there’s a difference between the show and the charity, know that producer and host Shad is also executive director of the charity.)
We journalists frequently cite the First Amendment in the course of doing our jobs, because it establishes the independence of the press from government interference. It’s an important concept. None of us should ever engage in any practice that creates conflicts. By sponsoring this dinner, Shad and Nevada Newsmakers have done just that.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Monday, Apr. 23, 2007 at 8:09 AM
CARSON CITY — We don’t know if the rest of you are following the saga of U.S. Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., who is yet another Republican under scrutiny by the FBI. But we covered Doolittle long ago when we were young and writing for the since-defunct Sacramento Union. (That newspaper, which went out of business in 1994, has since been resurrected as an online publication.)
Anyway, we recall interviewing Doolittle as he packed his office for his very first term in Congress way back in the day. And we got reacquainted with him recently as he’s faced scrutiny for alleged wrongdoing. This account in the Washington Post highlights the issues (not to mention reporting that the GOP is in big trouble come election time, and that yet another politician who we covered way back in the day, U.S. Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif., is also under scrutiny for allegedly wrongdoing. Man, we can sure pick ‘em, huh?)
Anyway, the deal with Doolittle seems to be this:
• He allegedly used his office and seat on the House Appropriations Committee to get federal money for a defense contractor (one linked to the corruption probe of former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., now a federal prisoner).
• Doolittle’s wife, Julie Dootlittle, was running a fundraising business operated out of the Doolittle home in Virginia. That firm, which worked on Doolittle’s political campaigns, among other initiatives, was raided by the FBI on April 13. The Justice Department has been looking into her company, and other, similar companies, to track payments made by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff to the spouses of some lawmakers.
• Because of the ongoing scandal, Doolittle was re-elected to office with less than a majority of the vote, 49 percent, in 2006.
• And he’s formed a legal defense fund to battle the allegations against him.
Now, we don’t know about you, but this all seems pretty damn familiar. Where else have we heard about a politician who allegedly used his office to help defense contractors, whose wife received payments that may be considered back-door income, who is under FBI investigation, who won office with less than 50 percent of the vote, and who formed a legal defense fund to deal with it? We just can’t put our finger on it.
Oh, wait! It’s Gov. Jim Gibbons! Why, it’s almost the same story exactly! (Except for the fact that Gibbons isn’t connected — so far as we know — to Abramoff the way Doolittle is. Oh, and Doolittle went through legal channels when he set up his legal defense fund, and Gibbons didn’t. Other than that, they could be the same man!)
posted by Steve Sebelius
Friday, Apr. 20, 2007 at 11:32 AM
CARSON CITY — It’s getting all partisan up in this bitch.
Not only are there more partisan votes in the state Senate, but the Assembly is getting a little testy, as well. There, Republicans are a 15-person minority, and can be steamrolled at the whim of majority Democrats.
There’s very little that the Republicans can do to protest, but one tactic that the minorities in both houses use is voting in a partisan bloc against certain bills. Usually, it’s bills that aren’t critical or won’t cause Republican members election problems later on.
But if you read the Review-Journal today, you’ll no doubt have seen this story, which reports that the Republicans voted against AB 331 and an amendment thereto, which calls on the state engineer to encourage water suppliers to set prices that encourage conservation.
You mean, Republicans voted against encouraging water conservation? Why, that’s so stereotypical. And mock-worthy. And easily preventable by, say, actually reading the text of the bill.
So how did the Republicans let their partisan frustration lead them to go on the record against saving water?
“What happened, honestly, is we got our notes mixed up. We make a mistake. We meant to vote for the bill,” said Assembly Minority Leader Garn Mabey. “We made a mistake.”
Indeed, they did. Democrats in the Senate have been able to avoid voting against bills that, for example, encourage the love of babies and the imprisonment of criminals. The GOP in the lower house should be able to do the same. And Speaker Barbara Buckley has the prescription for how to do it: Read the bills, and don’t just rely on party leader’s notes.
The good news: On Friday, votes in the Assembly were almost all unanimous. Apparently, we can just get along. Mostly.
• Republicans hate mandates. That much is clear from this week’s big debate over state Sen. Dina Titus’ bill to force the few insurance companies that don’t already cover a vaccine for the human papilloma virus to do so. When the first vote was taken on April 13, Titus got every Democrat plus Republican state Sens. Mark Amodei and Randolph Townsend.
But after Townsend recalled the bill and set it aside, Titus was forced to remove the mandate with respect to local government self-funded insurance programs. That move was a big blow to the bill, since local governments are among the few entities left that don’t offer the potentially life-saving vaccine.
So after the local government mandate was removed, Titus not only got all her Democrats, Amodei and Townsend, she added a couple Republicans, too: state Sens. Dennis Nolan and Dean Rhodes.
Who are the holdouts? They are: State Sens. Bob Beers, Barbara Cegavske, Warren Hardy, Joe Heck, Bill Raggio, and Maurice Washington.
C’mon, people. As California’s legendary Jesse Unruh once said, “sometimes, you have to rise above principles.”
• When is more money not more money? When it’s calculated using legislative math.
On paper, it looks like Gov. Jim Gibbons has given the state’s K-12 education system lots more money than before, $300 million in fact. That’s a lot more than the $190 million in new money given to the state’s higher education system.
Or is it?
According to Assemblyman Morse Arberry, the $300 million will go mostly to inflation, salary increases, utilities, and additional enrollment. And as far as Arberry is concerned, he wants unencumbered new money beyond that, at least on par with what the state’s colleges and universities are getting. The Review-Journal calculates that would cost an additional $75 million.
In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, there’s not exactly bags of money sitting around in Carson City these days. (We know; we’ve looked.)
Something tells us this is going to be a battle that goes to the last hour of the last day of this Legislature.
• When are fees not fees? Well, they’re always fees. And they’re getting support from people like Raggio, the state Senate’s majority leader. In a budget work session on Thursday, Raggio wasn’t shy about indicating his support for fees assessed on industries to pay for their regulation.
Lawmakers agree to the fees. And so do industries, which get up and running a lot sooner when there’s enough money to pay for required inspections and certifications.
But will Gov. Jim Gibbons agree? He has said he will not sign any bill that contains a tax increase, a fee increase or anything that looks or smells remotely like that.
Since an initiative that Gibbons authored back in the 1990s says you need a two-thirds majority to increase taxes or fees, Raggio’s support will go a long way toward ensuring the measures pass by that margin. So the question then becomes, what does Gibbons do?
If he vetoes the bills, he will have kept his campaign-trail promise not to support taxes, not to mention upholding the Americans for Tax Reform’s infamous pledge. (They put pledge-breakers on a hall of shame website!) But the Legislature mostly likely will override his veto, and the fees will stand, thus making Gibbons irrelevant to the process. And irrelevant is not something that you want to be when you’re, say, governor. Plus, he’ll undoubtedly incur the wrath of Raggio, who believes in the process very deeply. (You’d rather be irrelevant than on Raggio’s shit list.)
If he signs the bills, reasoning (correctly) that their passage by a two-thirds majority means the Legislature will just override him, he stays a part of the process and in Raggio’s good graces, but he also breaks his pledge. The right-wing will be sure to pillory him for going back on it, and comparisons to George H.W. Bush are inevitable. At this point, his no-tax pledge is all the governor has.
It’s quite a dilemma, and yet another reason nobody should ever promise something like no new taxes.
• And, just in case any of you readers are getting sick of the Legislature, why don’t we look at some other political news?
• If you didn’t think that U.S. Rep. Jon Porter was getting into the race against U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, you should now. Porter jumped in with both feet after Reid said publicly that he thinks the Iraq war is lost, and that top government officials know it.
“I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — [know] this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” Reid said.
Porter, quoted in the same Associated Press story that reported Reid’s remarks, replied thus: “I have more faith in our soldiers than the Senate majority leader. I believe our troops can win this war as past generations have prevailed when our country’s future is at stake.”
Ouch, baby. That one is going to leave a mark.
Now, don’t get us wrong. We believe what Porter said isn’t accurate. Our troops can’t win the current war, because it’s a civil war in which they are only bystanders. And this war is not like “past wars,” which were planned and executed by men wiser than our current leadership, with just cause and discrete goals. Iraq is more like a bad misadventure, begun in lies and destined, inevitably, to be a stain on national honor.
But Porter was right about having faith in our troops: They won the ground war in days, rolling Iraq’s creaky military like a Marine taking down a Girl Scout. After that, there has literally been nothing whatsoever to “win” in Iraq.
That’s practical reality, however. Political reality is that Porter has his first solid issue to levy against Reid in three years. And Reid — if he’s to win his personal war, for reelection — can’t give Porter too many more of those.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Thursday, Apr. 19, 2007 at 4:14 PM
CARSON CITY — The snow has melted, dear readers, but the exterior temperature clock in our nifty Ford Five Hundred rental still shows an outside temperature below a level acceptable to humans. But we soldier on, thanks to a nice overcoat, gloves and warm glow in our hearts that always attends our visits to the Legislature.
So what’s the haps in the capital, as the kids might say? Let’s take a look:
• Could somebody please give Assemblyman Ty Cobb a copy of the legislative rules of procedure? He looked like he was badly in need of them on the Assembly floor on Wednesday. Then again, Speaker Barbara Buckley seemed only too happy to school Cobb from the rostrum as to the proper protocols for debating bills and their amendments on the Assembly floor.
Although Cobb was the only person to vote against Buckley’s elevation to speaker, we’re sure her gentle admonitions to Cobb were done in love.
Then again, maybe what Cobb really needs is a copy of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, since he irked Assemblyman Bernie Anderson by his antics. The Assembly was discussing a bill that would block judges from sealing court cases whenever they feel like it. And Cobb was trying to bring an amendment that would let judges seal cases whenever they thought it was in the best interests of the community, which is to say, whenever they feel like it.
Yes, that is totally subjective and guts the intent of the bill. That’s probably why, in the words of Judiciary Committee Chairman Anderson, the committee “had no appetite for the amendment and thus it was rejected.”
But never-say-die Cobb brought it haphazardly to the floor, where he apparently violated a couple points of legislative protocol. Buckley stepped in to help. In love.
Oh, and of course, much like the rest of his bills this session, the Cobb Amendment failed.
• There was a little more acrimony on the Senate floor on Wednesday. It seems outnumbered Democrats in the upper house are finally growing weary of what they perceive as heavy handed treatment by Republicans, who hold a one-vote majority.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio juggled committee assignments before the session to make sure Democrats didn’t have a majority on any committees, which had happened in past years. And things really came to a head when Minority Leader Dina Titus’ bill to require insurance companies to offer a vaccine for a virus that causes cervical cancer was pulled off the general file after it had been passed and set aside.
Voice votes that were normally unanimous suddenly started going along party lines, and since the Senate is divided 11 to 10, it was hard for us at Various Things & Stuff to hear who really had more. Luckily, state Sen. Mark Amodei, not us, was serving as president pro tem of the upper house, and his hearing was good enough to hand each divided vote to the bare Republican majority.
Oh, by the way, Titus was allowed to amend her bill so that local government’s self-funded insurance programs didn’t have to cover the vaccine, which on Thursday allowed the measure to pass the Senate – again – and head over to the Assembly.
Anybody want to bet that local governments will once more be required to offer the vaccine once this measure gets to the Assembly, and the Senate will once again be forced to vote on it? We’re smelling conference committee on this one.
• And speaking of Titus, she was in classic form this morning during a joint meeting of the Senate Finance Committee and the Assembly Ways & Means Committee. Titus was wondering aloud at the rather rapid erasure of the projected $137 million deficit, which was accomplished in large part by recalculating future welfare caseloads, accounting for about $50 million in savings.
As Carlos Brandenburg, administrator of the state’s mental health division, was explaining the budget, Titus went off. Either the welfare caseload was wrong to begin with, or the most recent estimates are fictional, Titus thundered. Either way, it’s no way to run the system.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, doctor,” Titus said.
Brandenburg, for his part, remained calm. “The numbers are what they are,” he said.
The numbers, according to the Review-Journal, are significant: The state anticipates 6,135 fewer welfare cases in the next fiscal year, and 9,531 next year. How? According to the R-J, it’s the strong economy and a beefed up ID check to prevent illegal immigrants from taking advantage of state services.
• Nevada attracts a lot of stupid people, and its having a negative impact on the state.
That’s the crass our totally oversimplified version of an erudite presentation given by university system Vice Chancellor Jane Nichols to the Assembly Education Committee. And while Nichols presented some interesting statistics and stark trends, the upshot of her talk was depressing.
According to Nichols, for every 100 students who start high school, only 51 graduate. Of those, just 28 enter college, and only 19 are still around by their sophomore year. And of those original 100 students, just 10 actually graduate from college. (Nationally, it’s more like 18.)
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, people moving to Las Vegas aren’t that educated, either. In 2005, 16.1 percent had less than a high school education, 27.3 percent had a high school diploma, 30.9 percent had some college but just 17 percent were college graduates and 9.3 percent had an advanced or professional degree.
As a result, 28.6 percent of the workforce has an associate’s degree (the kind you get from a community college) and 21.2 percent has a bachelors degree or better. Nevada ranks 46th in the nation for educational background of its workforce.
“As long as Nevadans don’t think they need a college degree, we’re going to have a problem,” Nichols said.
While that might have been fine for the past, Nichols said more and more jobs will require a college education. Which is not so good when you consider that the state university system is projecting that college enrollment will drop in coming years, from 6.4 percent this year to 6.15 percent in 2014.
“We have to change the Nevada perception of reality,” Nichols said. “If we don’t change that we won’t have to worry about illegal immigration in this state, because the education levels in Mexico will surpass us. We will be an undeveloped nation called Nevada.”
Assemblyman Harvey Munford said the problem comes because the gambling industry is the No. 1 source of employment, and good-paying jobs that don’t require advanced education are plentiful. “We need to get away from casinos being our No. 1 industry,” he said. As a state, Nevada needs to start attracting good jobs that do require a college education.
For her part, Nichols recalled the 1960s, in which there was a national surge in science and engineering education as people participated in the space race with the former Soviet Union. Our new “space race,” could be in the fields of health care or alternative energy, she said.
“We still have to think about the future of Nevada,” she said.
And now, for a few legislative Quick Hits. Think of them as dessert for reading through the serious stuff:
• According to a series of obscure notes written in shaky hand on napkins gathered during a Barrick Goldstrike reception at the coolest coffee shop in Nevada – Comma Coffee – Assemblyman Dr. Joe Hardy was totally wearing his “got gold?” Barrick hat backwards. We think we must have been addled by the microbrews served at the reception, because we just can’t picture the Boulder City physician as a gangsta.
• Winos in the Legislature? Sure, some lawmakers have booze in their office. If you had to work these hours and do what these people do, you’d be driven to drink, too! But actually selling wine in the legislative gift shop?
That’s a serious proposal, embodied in SB 430, which is on it’s way to approval in the state Senate. The bill provides for the gift shop to sell “souvenir wine” along with other trinkets currently available, like pens, polo shirts, jackets, portfolios, wallets and the like.
We at Various Things & Stuff volunteered our services – pro bono, of course – to select the vintages that could be offered for sale in the gift shop. We do it out of love for our state and patriotism. And Bordeaux.
• It not just nice to be nice. It’s the law! Or at least it is if SB 491 – which is on its way to state Senate approval – becomes law. Under that law, the state’s law books have to be nice to disabled people. Whoops. We just violated the law! Here, why don’t we just let you read it for yourselves:
“The Legislative Counsel shall, to the extent practicable, ensure that person with physical, mental or cognitive disabilities are referred to in Nevada Revised Statutes using language that is commonly viewed as respectful and sentence structure that refers to the person without referring to his disability.
“Words and terms that are preferred for use in the Nevada Revised Statutes include, without limitation, ‘persons with disabilities,’ ‘persons with mental illness,’ ‘persons with mental retardation’ and other words and terms that are structured in a similar manner.
“Words and terms that are not preferred for use in Nevada Revised Statutes include, without limitation, ‘disabled,’ ‘handicapped,’ ‘mentally disabled,’ ‘mentally ill,’ ‘mentally retarded’ and other words and terms that tend to equate the disability with the person.”
Got that? Good. Oh, and under an amendment passed by the Senate today, the same goes for the Nevada Administrative Code, which is the set of rulemaking books that are based on the NRS.
• Although the state Senate had a long agenda, it still found the time to approve an amendment to a bill repealing the payroll tax on banks today. And why not, with the giddiness in the air caused by the revelation that Nevada no longer has a deficit! Why, it’s time to break open a case of the souvenir wine!
What’s that? What about the $3.8 billion road-building shortfall? The ignored $1 billion iNVest plan for schools? The large number of uninsured people in Nevada, lots of them children? The fact that our Supreme Court’s chief justice has told us our prisons are going to be over capacity before the end of the year?
Well, transportation, schools, kids and jails don’t have heavy influence over the votes of some members of our Legislature, people! Banks do! Or at least they do over these people.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2007 at 2:00 PM
The Las Vegas Monorail might suck now, but thanks to some nifty marketing, it’s going to be great soon!
If you’ve read anything in the newspaper about the monorail, you’ve likely to have read some version of those words, usually from the lips of monorail spokeswoman Ingrid Reisman. Sadly, no matter how many times she repeats the mantra, it’s no closer to being true.
But after reading her most recent quote, we at Various Things & Stuff decided to take a look at just how long Reisman has been parroting the party line. It must be a pretty long time; she didn’t even bother with a live interview this time, opting to release this statement instead: "We are expanding and enhancing our marketing and advertising partnerships to increase awareness of the system and ultimately ridership."
The whole "marketing will save us" thing actually isn’t original with Reisman; it was originated by former monorail spokesman Todd Walker. Back on March 10, 2005, the Review-Journal quoted him thus: "I think there’s only one way for the system to go, and it’s upward," Walker said. "I think we’ll see a steady increase in the number of riders due to the word-of-mouth and increased marketing, now that we’re past the reliability problem."
Much like the rest of what Walker said about the monorail during his tenure, this quote turned out to be bullshit. In fact, there was another way to go, inconceivable as that might be. And that way was down. Walker predicted a daily average of 30,000 riders; alas, the numbers continued to slowly fall.
But Reisman, then an employee of the Regional Transportation Commission, was getting her feet wet with the whole monorail-defending business. She said this: "We have a constantly changing visitor population. I think it’ll be a little bit of an education process until visitors know the monorail is there and they know how to use it and are comfortable using it."
After Walker left and Reisman took over, things didn’t get better. Faced with some bad news, Reisman was quoted in the Feb. 11, 2006 R-J saying this about the monorail’s efforts to market itself and sell tickets: "We have a lot of initiatives we’re working on this year. We’re very excited about this year."
It turned out to be the monorail’s worst year ever, except for the first year, when it was pretty much non-functional due to mechanical problems.
A few months later, on April 14, 2006, Reisman was still singing the same tune. "Reisman hopes several marketing initiatives will soon start to show ridership results," the R-J story says. "’I believe we’re making huge strides in increasing the awareness [of the monorail]. Seeing results in ridership, I think it’s going to take a couple of months."
Of course, a couple of months later, things were no better. On July 20, 2006, Reisman was still pleading for just a little more time. "Nothing happens overnight," she said in an R-J story. "Everything I’m working on today won’t increase sales tomorrow. It will in a few months." (You guessed it; a few months later, things would still blow.)
Perhaps realizing this, Reisman added: "I think really where we’ll see a lot of progress will be in 2007. We’ll see some in 2006. Everybody will be testing it out."
Flash forward to the end of summer, Aug. 30, 2006, where Reisman put the window for success at six months to a year. "I’d love to see it sooner, but I have to be realistic," Reisman said. (It’s still too early to call the one-year window, but six months later in March, things hadn’t exactly turned around.)
By Oct. 18, 2006, the time frame had been widened as talk of default on the state-issued, tax-free bonds spread due to poor performance. "We’re developing a good plan, and we’re implementing what we need to implement for the system to perform the way it’s supposed to perform," Reisman said.
"We’re constantly looking at our business model. We’re constantly tweaking things here and there," Reisman added. "We still anticipate a 12- to 18-month time frame to see results. There are still so many activities that we are just starting to implement."
Those activities didn’t bear fruit over the next four months, which sparked an eruption of promises in an R-J story published Jan. 30, 2007, which reported that 2006 was the monorail’s worst year ever.
The paper quoted monorail CEO Curtis Myles — who participated in an editorial board at the newspaper’s offices in December — saying this: "There is an expectation that we’ll see, as a result of the fare increase, some decreases in ridership. We expect to increase ridership from marketing efforts. Hopefully, the two will offset."
And Reisman? She offered this: "It was always expected that a transit system fare increase would result in a ridership decrease; however, the monorail implemented marketing initiatives simultaneously to boost ridership. We expect to see the full impact of these initiatives in the next year or so."
After that, in early March, the monorail announced it was going to report its ridership results every quarter instead of every month. Could it be the monorail realized that Reisman’s oft-repeated promises were getting stale?
Not at all. On Tuesday, remember, she said the monorail was "expanding and enhancing our marketing and advertising partnerships."
Yeah, success is just around the corner. In the next year or so. Or after that. You’ll see.
posted by Steve Sebelius
Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2007 at 12:03 PM
CARSON CITY — As the snow — yes, the snow — falls here in the state capital, we can’t help but be transported back to our idyllic youth in the great city of Huntington Beach, Calif. There, we had no snow. Which is super, because WE HATE SNOW!
But, neither rain, nor snow, nor endless floor sessions full of legislative arcania, nor thick clouds of cigar smoke nor gloom of night will keep us from our appointed rounds. It’s bloggin’ time, people!
• State Sen. Joe Heck is a physician. He’s also in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he holds the rank of colonel. And he’s recently been assigned as commanding officer of a San Diego medical unit that oversees troops returning from, and deploying to, battle fronts in the war on terror. (That’s a battalion-sized commands with elements in five different areas around Southern California, including lovely snow-free San Diego.)
We say that only to raise this legitimate question: Why would a physician vote against inoculating young women against cancer? That’s precisely what Heck did, twice. He’s voted against state Sen. Dina Titus’ bill to mandate insurance coverage for the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer, once in the commerce committee and once on the Senate floor.
Heck has an answer: He’s against telling insurance companies that they must cover something. “We are one of the most heavily mandated states” in the nation, Heck told us. “It’s a philosophical issue with respect to mandates.”
With each mandate, Heck said, the cost of an insurance premium rises between 0.5 and 1 percentage point, he said.
Oh, and just in case you might think he’s sexist, Heck reports he voted against mandates to cover prostate cancer screenings for the same reason.
• We’ve got to hand it to the Nevada Resort Association. On Tuesday, NRA President Bill Bible came up with a new, creative and actually meaningful objection to a state lottery, one that we had never heard before.
Under state gambling regulations, “all gaming devices submitted for approval must theoretically pay out a mathematically demonstrable percentage of all amounts wagered, which must not be less than 75 percent for each wager available for play on the device.”
And, Bible says, since lotteries pay out less than 75 percent of monies wagered, they can’t possibly legalize lottery machines here in Nevada.
Good one, Mr. Bible. If your industry didn’t already have the Legislature in its pocket, you might actually haven been able to win on the merits, at least when it comes to that one.
• Speaking of the NRA and the lottery, the rest of the arguments deployed against it were — oh, what’s the word? — totally bankrupt? Yeah, that’s it.
Lotteries don’t make investments in buildings and jobs like bricks-and-mortar casinos do, and, according to some gambling industry types, a lottery can become a regressive tax on the poor.
A regressive tax on the poor? Pardon our French, but what the fuck are slot machines? And we’ve hardly seen casinos summon their sympathy for the legions of gamblers who are even as you read this pumping cash into casinos that are regularly posting record revenue figures these days.
Kudos to Assemblyman Marcus Conklin for shooting that old saw down. “You name me a tax where the public has a choice. How a person can call that regressive — I don’t understand it,” he said. Well, that’s because it doesn’t make sense, assemblyman.
But the industry does have at least one other good argument.
“The state, in effect, becomes the competitor to the state’s biggest industry,” Bible lamented.
Now this is a legitimate objection. Casinos are in the business of separating suckers from their money thanks to long odds. If the state were to create a lottery, it would also be engaging in the business of separate suckers from their money thanks to even longer odds.
So when, we wonder, will the NRA be asking its friendly crew of lawmakers in the Legislature to close the Las Vegas Convention Center, run by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority? After all, the convention authority competes with similar venues at The Venetian, the Mandalay Bay and the MGM Grand, among others. If government competing with private industry is really that bad a thing, we must close the convention center!
• And finally this morning, we ran into the nice folks from the Nevada Cancer Institute today at the coolest coffee shop in Carson City, Comma Coffee. They were in town for an early-morning meeting to ask for government funding for the center, which aims to research new cures and treatments for that disease.
According to institute CEO Heather Murren, the institute has been able to leverage those state dollars to raise even more money in the private sector, as well as recruit top researchers from places like Yale, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Stanford and the Salk Institute, among others.
Very impressive, and well worth the $10 million the institute got in the last two-year state budget. If you ask us, the Legislature should keep up the funding, not only to help the institute’s current 2,500 patients, but also to help the thousands of people who will develop this disease until a cure is finally found.
And just because we’re up in the (literally) frozen north, it doesn’t mean that we’re still not keeping an eye on things going on down south. Here’s a couple of Quick Hits, Southern Variety:
• U.S. Rep. Jon Porter may have only raised $234,927, but don’t count him out yet. Here’s why:
First, it’s not surprising he raised less in the first quarter of 2007 than in the first quarter of 2006. He was in an election year 12 months ago.
Second, he’s now a member of the Ways & Means Committee, which we understand makes you popular among donors.
Third, he’s shown an ability to raise plenty of cash in the past; in his razor-thin victory over Democrat Tessa Hafen, Porter collected $3 million.
On the other hand, Porter is now in the minority, and from what we understand, that cuts your fundraising ability. (USA Today on Tuesday published this handy chart showing how much more Democrats have collected in 2007 — after they took over Congress — than they got in 2005, when the Republicans were in charge.)
• Speaking of political fundraising, USA Today also published a state-by-state chart as to where the candidates were getting their money. Based on that chart, the Silver State financially loves, in descending numerical order:
Rudy Giuliani, Republican ($526,375)
Mitt Romney, Republican ($397,235)
Hillary Clinton, Democrat ($317,000)
John McCain, Republican ($92,025)
Barack Obama, Democrat ($63,530)
John Edwards, Democrat ($45,500)
No love for our man Joe Biden? Oh, Nevada. Why must you always break our hearts?
• Are we the only ones who think that the approval of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s pipeline to rural Nevada is a huge loss for opponents? Sure, the state engineer limited the water draw to 40,000 acre feet per year for the first 10 years, and perhaps as much as 60,000 after that. (The SNWA wanted 91,000 acre feet per year.)
But the point of this whole exercise was the approval of the pipeline itself, we think. Once it’s in place, the amount is a matter of negotiation with rural residents and the state’s political apparatus. We’d bet a lot that Las Vegas will be sucking way more than 40,000 acre feet before too long.
• You know, developer Bill Walters and Mayor Oscar Goodman are absolutely right: The investigation into the allegedly criminal collaboration between the city and Walters needs to move forward, and the guilty parties need to be brought to justice.
We’re just curious as to why Walters, who allegedly got plenty of favorable treatment from the city over the years, and Goodman, who allegedly provided some of that treatment, are so gung-ho on the subject. A report commissioned by the former attorney general already alleged wrongdoing. Shouldn’t they be keeping their heads down?
Oh, that’s right. So long as the cloud of scrutiny hangs over them, Walters and Goodman can’t possibly move forward with Walters original plan, which is to build houses as close as 20 feet to the property line of a sewage treatment plant. And we may be just speculating here, but we think that’s precisely what Walters has in mind.
In the meantime, the city is trying to adopt a series of reforms to prevent another Walters-type incident. The list includes asking top city managers to stop being such goddamn pussies. (We’re pretty sure the city’s formal plan is worded somewhat differently.)
posted by Steve Sebelius
Monday, Apr. 16, 2007 at 10:37 AM
CARSON CITY — We’ve arrived in Cartoon City for a little legislative coverage, but thus far, things are quiet. Perfect for catching up on a little business from the tail end of last week, in the form of Quick Hits! Here we go:
» You might think Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley is being unnecessarily belligerent by proposing a tax increase, in part, to deal with the $3.8 billion backlog in road-building projects that’s vexing the state. After all, Gov. Jim Gibbons has said he’ll veto all tax increases, including the weight-distance tax on trucks in Nevada that’s a key part of the Democrats’ proposal. But we’d have to disagree, for a couple reasons.
First, Buckley wasn’t the one who took a stupid no-new-taxes pledge while she was running to lead the (now second-) fastest growing state in the nation. She’s under no obligation to live under Gibbons’ ill-advised promise.
Second, thanks once again to Gibbons, who in the 1990s qualified an initiative that requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to create or raise taxes, Buckley will have to get a super-majority in order to get a weight-distance tax passed anyway. And you know how many votes are needed to override a gubernatorial veto and render the governor totally irrelevant? That’s right: Two-thirds.
So the real question is, can Buckley and the Democrats get to two-thirds in the first place (a lock in the Assembly, an open question in the Senate) and, ultimately, can the forces of reason hold that two-thirds in the event of a veto? She’s already got Republican Minority Leader Garn Mabey saying that a roads solution might have to be something the governor might oppose. Can more votes from the other side of the aisle be far behind? (By the way, Mabey deserves credit for standing up with Buckley at a news conference on the traffic problems; he’s sure to be pilloried by the right for doing the right thing.)
Third, and perhaps most important, at least Buckley and her fellow Democrats have done something besides say that we need "innovative, creative" solutions to fix the roads. She’s presented a plan. It’s a lot more than Gibbons — whose big idea was to look under highways for water to sell — has done.
» Speaking of Gibbons, what’s up with him fibbing — again? He told the Associated Press’ Kathleen Hennessey that he released all the receipts for his 2000 Turkey vacation with a Reno defense contractor. But it turns out, Hennessey wasn’t born yesterday and checked. Whoops! Busted!
"We paid for it all, and we have the receipts. We’ve made those available to everybody, including the press, Gibbons said.
But Gibbons’ Washington, D.C. attorneys said they wouldn’t release the receipts, which detail a trip taken by the Gibbons family with Fatih and Eren Ozmen, owners of Sierra Nevada Corp., a company that Jim Gibbons later tried to help by trying to wrangle a fat defense contract while then Assemblywoman Dawn Gibbons worked on a $35,000 public-relations contract for the same company at the same time. And don’t forget that Hennessey was asking in the first place because Gibbons apparently didn’t pay the whole cost of a Caribbean cruise he took with another defense contractor that he also tried to help.
So, how did the governor explain himself? "I can’t control them [his lawyers]. … You’ll just have to go back and ask them. But we have all the receipts, we paid for everything, take it for granted we paid for it," Gibbons said.
What? You totally just got caught in a fib and you’re asking us to trust you? Um, to quote the man Gibbons has said is his political hero, "trust but verify." And we can verify, governor, since you’re lawyers work for you, and will do what you tell them to do. If you say release the receipts, they will. Until then, we have plenty of reason not to take you at your word, and reason more to wonder just why you won’t come clean.
» Still speaking of Gibbons, let’s give the governor some credit where it’s due: He’s trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Nevada. Gibbons may have argued against the Kyoto Protocol while in Congress, and he may not be the world’s biggest believer in global climate change, but he is acting to do something in Nevada, and every little bit helps. And given that Nevada saw a 55 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions (for a total of 47.2 million metric tons), the help couldn’t come at a better time.
» You mean, despite the governor’s no-new-taxes pledge, an unfunded $3.8 billion roads plan, an ignored $1 billion iNVest schools plan, and a projected shortfall in the state’s revenues that caused the governor to request a $112 million cut in new spending, there are still people who want to give tax breaks to banks?
Who are these people? (State Sens. Terry Care and Bob Coffin sensibly voted no.)
» That specter Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki sees in the rear-view mirror is the goddess Justice, and she’s pissed.
» Now there’s a big surprise. Assemblyman Ty Cobb didn’t get a single bill passed this session. And he only got hearings on three out of seven. Some blame the fact that he voted against Buckley for speaker, but that fails to consider the possibility that he just had stupid bills.
» We’re not prepared to say that | 
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